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This is TeamCow

I always loved bicycles. I can still remember learning to ride, and rolling around on the sidewalks of the townhouses we lived in when I was probably five years old. I still remember the awesome Raleigh BMX bike I had with Skyway Tuff wheels when I was 12 or 13. And I still remember the first mountain bike I had, which was a Precision.

It wasn’t that good, but it was very useful to me, because I took it apart and put it back together again as best I could. Which often times, wasn’t very good.

In the early 90’s, going to Northwest Community College in Terrace, BC, I encountered real cyclists. They had bikes from real bike shops, like Specializeds and Nishikis, and I desperately wanted in on that fun.

So I started buying Mountain Bike Action magazine. It was all so confusing at first – chainstays, bottom brackets, butted tubes – I had no idea what these things were. But I didn’t give up, and I eventually learned all the terms, and decided that I needed a real bike.

My first real bike was a Bridgestone MB-5 just like this;

I probably should have bought something better as I rode it nearly every day, and wore out or broke nearly every part on it. But it was brilliant.

Eventually my enthusiasm for cycling because infectious, and I began to ride with people I worked with. They all bought bikes at some point after I started working with them at a grocery store. And we thought since we were going to ride together, why not pretend to be a team?

We somehow knew right from the start that our “team” would not be some group of extreme enthusiast. We spent a lot of our time making fun of people like that. What we really liked, was the ridiculousness of naming a football team “Cows” like on South Park, so we stole it. And so we became TeamCow.

We rode regularly, though never that hard, and never raced or rode with any local clubs or shop rides. We spend as much time pondering the BBQ and beer after our rides as we did deciding what trails to take. We stuck to ourselves, and were happy to do that.

Eventually, we left that job, didn’t live in the same house, and generally moved on. Nothing sad or pre-determined, it just happened. Apart from riding with my brother, I haven’t ridden with any of the other three core members in well over ten years.

Of course, we liked to say that “if you wanted to be in TeamCow, then you were in TeamCow.” We didn’t have any initiation rites, or application forms. We just rode.

So the team is defunct, but the attitude lives on. And now, I’m bringing back the website.

This is TeamCow.

One thought on “This is TeamCow”

As I was procrastinating tonight, because it’s what I do, despite being exhausted and clearly needing to go to bed, so I opened Twitter on my computer. That alone is rare since I don’t use Twitter much to begin with and almost never on my PC. Nonetheless, what pop’s up but a recommendation to follow @aguycalled80. I did a double, triple, then quadruple take and was like “Is that…..”, clicked on it and sure enough “holy f**k, it’s 80!”

In all seriousness I am not an online stalker (I’m not even on Facebook – said in my best ‘I don’t even own a TV’ voice) but long story short I was looking through your tweets when I saw a link to teamcow.ca. I’ve now lost over an hour of my life reading your posts, while having a LOT of memories come flooding back about riding in TeamCow, bikes, BBQ’s, beer, etc… You haven’t lost the knack for writing; really great site and really great posts.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Shoot me an e-mail if you ever want to catch up.